861–870 of 1001 posts
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WhatsApp make billions of dollars but Meta wants it to make hundreds of billions. There's no way to appease the dragon.
Curious how whatsapp makes any money besides the handful of companies that use it as a customer support portal
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This has led to all sorts of opinions on the thread, which are all very interesting! I do agree that just accepting this is not the way to go, and also that slowly making changes is a valid approach. I do want to qualify though, for those who aren't in a WhatsApp-heavy country, how things work. I looked at my latest messages and beyond all my friends and all my family, I have my accountant, my landlord, my barber, HO…
I understand that WhatsApp may be necessary to talk to businesses (because Signal didn't develop that, and I honestly don't think they should). But what would prevent people from using WhatsApp to talk to businesses and Signal to talk to friends? I have been using multiple channels with friends forever: phone call, mail, email, MSN Messenger, Facebook, IRC, ICQ, WhatsApp, Threema, Signal, Slack, Discord, Matrix, ...…
FWIW, as far as I ever could tell, Facebook did this correctly: the only real thing is letting a business have an account without a phone number; they then provide the software you can run on your server to be a WhatsApp client, so all of your user's messages are then end-to-end encrypted to your business. Yes: later on they decided they'd get in the business of offering a "hosted client"--which meant that, technically, if you used that service, they could see the messages, which caused a change to their terms of service, as a blanket statement that Facebook can't ever see messages isn't technically true anymore, which Signal threw a ton of FUD at :/--but anyone could have offered that service before (and could right now also for Signal).
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This has led to all sorts of opinions on the thread, which are all very interesting! I do agree that just accepting this is not the way to go, and also that slowly making changes is a valid approach. I do want to qualify though, for those who aren't in a WhatsApp-heavy country, how things work. I looked at my latest messages and beyond all my friends and all my family, I have my accountant, my landlord, my barber, HO…
I understand that WhatsApp may be necessary to talk to businesses (because Signal didn't develop that, and I honestly don't think they should). But what would prevent people from using WhatsApp to talk to businesses and Signal to talk to friends? I have been using multiple channels with friends forever: phone call, mail, email, MSN Messenger, Facebook, IRC, ICQ, WhatsApp, Threema, Signal, Slack, Discord, Matrix, ...…
Where it breaks down is for group conversations. If Person A won't use Signal and Person B won't use WhatsApp, you can't easily have group communications. And it only gets worse as the number of people in the group goes up.
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I am not interested in paying Google for anything. It's a company too big and powerful through immoral business (ads) I block all ads and wish commercial ads would cease to exist even though it would mean I couldn't use somethings anymore without payment.
I can understand weapons industry or alcohol industry as being immoral. However I do not understand how ads are immoral. It is annoying for some, while for some it is informative. Businesses inform the public about their services through ads. Or do you mean how Google implemented its ads?
Can we get a federated messenger already? Sure, we have email, but the MS/Google duopoloy has effectively unfederated that, with their inscrutable block lists and nonexistent appeals processes, allegedly in order to protect you from spam. Sure, XMPP is a thing, which has been mostly dead for well over a decade. Sure, Matrix is a thing, but every time I look at it, all I see is criticism of its specifications and poor…
Can we get a federated messenger already? Sure, we have email, but the MS/Google duopoloy has effectively unfederated that, with their inscrutable block lists and nonexistent appeals processes, allegedly in order to protect you from spam. Sure, XMPP is a thing, which has been mostly dead for well over a decade. Sure, Matrix is a thing, but every time I look at it, all I see is criticism of its specifications and poor…
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I don’t have the actual stats, but, sadly, it seems like a gigantic chunk of the “i would rather pay a small fee to use a service rather than paying for it with exposure to ads” crowd is mostly all-talk. And I am saying this as someone who genuinely believes in the “small fee instead of paying with ad exposure” approach. The one specific example of this that made me think so is the Youtube Premium situation. So many…
I know lots of people that pay for YT premium. Lots of people pay for Spotify too. I even pay for Kagi.
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What about non traveling Chinese?
I'd say Chinese people are aware that their Internet is pretty different from the rest of the world. Americans tend to believe everyone is trying very hard to be like them (when they think about the rest of the world at all).
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What about SMS?
They cost around 0.15€/message in Spain.